Google Gears is an open source plug-in for browsers, which the firm hopes will lead to the creation of new web standards.

The firm wants many of the people attending its developers conference to use the Gears tools, which are free to use, to adapt their own applications for offline usage.

Using Gears, online data that is usually held on web servers can be stored offline on an individual's computer, and then synchronised when the user logs back on to the web.

'Fills gap'

Chris Prince, the engineer leading the Gears project, told the conference in London: "We want a seamless experience between offline and online."

"This fills a gap for us," said Jeff Huber, a vice president of engineering at Google. "The internet is great, but you can't always be plugged in to it."

Initially, Google's RSS feed reader application - for reading news and blogs - will work offline, but the company plans to add other programmes, Mr Huber said.

A word processor with less functionality than WordPad isn't going to upset anyone's business model, online or off

Michael Gartenberg, Jupiter Research

He said Google's e-mail, calendar, word processing and spreadsheet programmes were logical candidates for offline access.

Gears works in most of the leading web browsers, such as Firefox and Internet Explorer, and will soon work with Safari and Opera.

"With Google Gears we're tackling a key limitation of the browser in order to make it a stronger platform for deploying all types of applications and enabling a better user experience in the cloud," Google chairman Eric Schmidt said in a statement.

He added: "We believe strongly in the power of the community to stretch this new technology to the limits of what's possible and ultimately emerge with an open standard that benefits everyone."